the domestic life

I think that's the longest I've gone without internet since its creation. Almost literally. Is that incredibly sad?
I've moved in completely, and while I still have some organizing to do I've moved on to more exciting parts of life. I can now cook, and I bought a large pot so I could make a dutch oven and now I can bake, too! I've been experimenting quite a bit, and while there have been a lot of failures (I blame the non-refrigerated yellow goop which passes for butter here) I made zucchini (okay, cucumber) bread yesterday and it was the most amazing thing I've ever eaten. I'm making it again tomorrow. And possibly, every day. Or every other, since I can probably limit myself to eating half a loaf a day. Maybe.
I also painted the main room of my house!! It's a really lovely blue color, and was an absurd ordeal to do. I ran out of paint twice (I still have a third of a wall to finish) and the paint roller I bought broke, and since those don't exist in village my neighbor gave me a foam mattress pad that I cut into sponges and used to paint two walls. And the paint is latex, which doesn't really come off of the floor, or clothes, or skin, or the kitchen implements I touched with my blue hands. So I feel like I'm in (bear with me) Arrested Development, with blue handprints all over my house. I get a kick out of it.
I've been trying to get out of the house and explore my village. I've done a couple of biking adventures, going to the dam and around the countryside. I've gone a few times to the big market that happens every three days in the smaller village that's about 7k away from my house. The main goal is usually to buy eggs (of the guinea fowl variety, no chicken eggs here) for my baking endeavors, but the market is just a very busy, exciting change of pace for my quiet life here, and I can usually get a free bissap drink from a lady I know there.
And after one particularly disastrous day when my sick dog followed me to the smaller market in town and walked over the produce- that was a bad, bad, day- I was brave enough to go back and now I'm friends with the women there and try out my pathetic moore language skills (mam data tomatoe. yaa wan wana? mam data pisi tomatoe. y barka: I want tomatoes. How much do they cost? I want a hundred francs worth of tomatoes. Thank you!) Also, they think that I'm obsessed with tomatoes.